Carpet Sweeper Tales Is One of the Top Comics of the Week

Julie Doucet was one of Drawn & Quarterly’s early finds when the prestigious indie comic publisher first launched 25 years ago. Her Dirty Plotte anthology was picked up by D&Q in 1991 and made her an important name in late 20th century indie comics and a feminist icon. Doucet soon retired from making long-form comics and became a fixture in the Montreal arts community, but now she is back with a new graphic novel that is very different from her previous, hand-drawn autobiographical comics.

Carpet Sweeper Tales can best be described as an avante-garde remix of Italian fumetti(photo novels) from the 1970s. Cutting up those vintage magazines, she repurposes them into absurdist scenes of men and women speaking in stilted advertising slogans and typographical nonsense. It’s like revisiting how memes must have been made before there were ever GIFs and Tumblr.